Introduction to R and Rstudio

R vs. RStudio

R is both the name of a programming language and a program

A photo of a racing type car with the safety bars on show as it has no roof

RStudio program

RStudio is a software application with tools to

improve your programming experience

RStudio is a piece of software that makes working with R much easier. So to continue the analogy, you can think of RStudio as like the dashboard, drivers seat and plush interior of the car. It won’t work without R doing all the work in the background, but it makes everything more comfortable and easier. The dashboard will give you additional information about what’s going on with the car, and the controls will allow you to change how the car works in a nice, easy way.

Don’t necessarily need to use RStudio - if you have prior IDE experience you can use other IDEs can be used like Visual Studio Code, but personally I’d recommend starting with RStudio if you haven’t previously used an IDE.

Confusingly, the company that developed the RStudio IDE also used to be called RStudio, but is now called Posit. If you see older materials you might still see Rstudio (the company) called by it’s own name.

RStudio features

RStudio open an R session - no longer have to think of them separately

All clickable areas have underlying code to automate in scripts
Works with other languages - not just R
Very easy to set up
New features are always added…

Open RStudio

Let’s open an R session

The Console is the R session.

You can code directly in the console…

pi*2

[1] 6.283185

37/12

[1] 3.083333

Screenshot of the RStudio console.

Introducing the Editor

If you don’t see the Editor pane, click top right button

And choose R Script from the drop down.

Keyboard shortcuts:
Ctrl + Shift + N
The cloud Ctrl + Shift + Alt + N

Screenshot of the menu from the icon of a white page with a green circle and a white cross

Editor features

The Editor is a text editor
Text is coloured
(the console is one colour)
Autocomplete

Keyboard shortcuts:
Ctrl + Z undoes but
Ctrl + Shift + Z to redo
Ctrl + Enter runs the code

Commenting

Comment code with a hash #

# this was a bad idea

Comment frequently, at least in the beginning

Keyboard shortcut:
Ctrl+Shift+C for commenting and uncommenting

Tools > Options > workspace

Reasons why this is default

Screenshot of the Tools/Global Options wizard

Tools > Options > colours

Accessibility and comfort for all

Screenshot of the Appearance tab from Tools/Global Options wizard